Declining Health & Frailty

What We Live For…

There are many ways to dance with an aging parent who has dementia. Toni Luciani invited his 91 year old mother to join him using photography and the canvas of her aging to create art. The photographic results in the…

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Aging Parents: The Falls Quiz

Everyone knows falls in older adults is bad news. They are the leading cause of fatal and non-fatal injuries in this age group. Every 22 minutes an older adult dies from a fall. That’s 66 deaths a day. If they…

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Healthcare Team Mind Map

Since healthcare in the United States is a specialist-driven system, aging parents wind up with provider teams. Overall, this is a good thing, but it creates two persistent challenges: 1. Keeping an accurate roster of providers, what they do, and…

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End Of The Line…

We take pains to keep the nursing home at arm’s length, a cultural purgatory that haunts our worst fears about being old. Yet, as Valery Hazanov found out, it is also an instructional landscape about who we are despite our…

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Boomers: It’s All How You Get There

“The perception is that the baby boomers are very active — they are, you know, climbing up mountains, and they are a very healthy bunch,” says King, a professor in the department of family medicine at the West Virginia University…

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Compassionate Body Guard

Our aging parents are not well matched for a healthcare system running on procedural autopilot. They need compassionate body guards who will help them make sense of their medical options based on their quality of life wishes and then help…

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Crossing the Eighty-Something Frontier

We all hope our aging parents will be robust and independent as they navigate their eighties. Some will, but the majority, nine out of ten, will not. They will become frail or suffer from dementia. They will wind up not…

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